How green is strategic decision-making in a green company?

This chapter provides a structured review of literature on strategic investment decision-making. It also draws upon literature from corporate social responsibility and finance, on 'green' investment, to develop a conceptual framework to interrogate the financial and narrative information publicly available. The aim is to support future case-based research using primarily archival methods, supplemented by key stakeholder interviews, to investigate how 'ethical' or green corporate decision-making is (what they do) compared with strategies and public relations statements (what they say) in companies that are considered to be performing well as 'green investments'. We start by identifying the intersection of three relevant fields of literature, then provide a structured literature review of key findings , theories and methodologies. We present some initial analysis of two business acquisition decisions taken in a case company by way of illustration, before setting out our recommendations for future research. We recommend a critical approach to corporate decision-making research, based on the concepts of stewardship, social contract and stakeholder theory.